New Vance City

Buried in the smoke-choked belly of the Rust Belt, the Rusted Cog Initiation Pit is where scrap becomes soldier. Every new Gear Rat must endure “The Grinding”—a brutal rite of passage where initiates, stripped of armor, name, and favor, are thrown into the pit to survive against jagged-toothed scrap beasts, sawblade hounds, and half-living constructs built from failed raiders and burned-out loader bots. There are no rules. Only survival. Those who live through the metal storm are yanked from the pit by chain-hooks, screaming and blood-slick, baptized in fire and oil, and branded with the symbol of Cog. They are fitted with their first graft—be it a pneumatic claw, steel jaw, or chassis spine. It’s not a fight. It’s a crucible. The Pit isn’t meant to test courage. It’s meant to kill weakness. In the Gear Rats’ world of oil-slick chaos and burn-marked law, only those who crawl from the gears belong to the tribe.

The Pit yawns wide at the heart of a collapsed industrial silo, its perimeter framed by half-toppled gantries, slag-piled scaffolding, and spiked fences made of broken drone limbs and rusted rebar. Towering floodlamps sputter above, casting jagged shadows over twisted murals of Cog—the warlord saint of torque and terror—welded into the steel walls. Chain-hoists dangle like execution ropes, some still red with heat. Below, the floor is chaos incarnate: rivet-studded kill zones littered with oil-slicked bones, sparking servo husks, and roaches the size of dogs crawling from gear-choked trenches. Steam vents hiss from cracked piping, mixing with the roar of crowd chants and the hydraulic grind of ancient machinery. A colossal iron gear—the Rusted Cog itself—grinds eternally in the center, its teeth packed with blood, steel filings, and the teeth of those who didn’t earn a name. Smoke hangs heavy. The stench is old oil, fear, and molten ambition. It’s not a place—it’s a warning.